


A Little Red London Phone Box

by imaginary_iby



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-24
Updated: 2012-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:57:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_iby/pseuds/imaginary_iby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor can spend the rest of his life with Rose Tyler; she cannot spend the rest of her life with him. A story of overcoming unequal life-spans and loving two men who are the same, but so very different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Red London Phone Box

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in the process of slowing moving all of my old eljay fic over to AO3, because I quite like this site, so this story is actually from a few years ago.

Rose gently smooths her thumb along the Doctor’s face, from temple to jaw, from jaw to temple. She takes great pains to trace the little lines that curve around his eyes; they’re there all the time now, not simply when he laughs. She thinks that they make him look rather dashing.

With a contented sigh, she brushes his endearingly ridiculous fringe out of his eyes and drifts her fingers up to run them through his hair. It’s a little salt-and-peppery, a little flecked with grey, but it’s still thick and luxurious and it still warms her belly.

She slides her palm across the plain of his chest, the silver hairs there tickling the spaces between her fingers. She can almost see his muscles quiver when she rubs her hand in small circles over his stomach; still flat as ever, despite the way his weight had fluctuated when he’d first become human.

She strokes her ring finger, (upon which a modest jewel now actually glints) along the dangerous path from one jutting hip to the other. Left to right, right to left, left to right and right to left. She knows without even looking that he’s growing hard in his sleep at the touch.

. . . .

The Doctor groggily blinks his way out of the fog that is sleep, his body responding to the gentle brushes and kisses against his skin well before his brain can.

Finally, once he’s accepted the reality that is being awake, he props himself up on his elbows to look down at her. Her tongue is tracing little circles into the hollows above his hip bones and all he can see is the top of her head, her light brown hair spilling around her face and tickling his legs.

She rests all of her weight on one elbow and brushes the errant strands back behind her ears with her free hand. Her gaze flickers up to meet his, and with their eyes holding each other she starts licking the skin around his navel. “You’re awake.”

He arches an eyebrow at her in reply, as if to say _of course I’m bloody awake when you’re doing that._

She smiles a particularly saucy smile and he can’t help but reach for her. Slithering up his body, she makes sure to slide her skin against his and it takes him no time at all to roll on top of her.

They move against each other for what feels like an impossibly long time, all sighs and gasps and moans and hitched breaths. There’s little in the bedroom that’s new for them anymore, not after so many years of sleeping together, but they find the familiarity impossibly arousing. The only difference is that these days when he comes, it takes him longer to recover.

When their hearts stop racing and their bodies still, he spends some time nuzzling her cheek before pulling back to look down at her, to study her beautiful face.

Where he has wrinkles, she has smooth skin. Where he has flecks of grey, she has her natural light brown.

He is growing older. She is not.

He wants to say so much. He wants to thank her for being so brave, for twining her life-span with his in a way that would have put his other self to shame. He wants to cuddle her close, when he thinks about her sobbing in the shower as she sometimes does, when thoughts of her human children dying before she does immobilize her. 

He opens his mouth to try, but she presses her fingers against his lips.

“I know,” she whispers to him. “I know.”

. . . .

The grey flecks grow in number until he has what she calls a _distinguished silver mop_. He thanks whatever grace that’s present for allowing him to keep a full head of hair, whatever colour it might be.

He spends more time tinkering in the garage now than he has ever done. She doesn’t know what he’s doing in there, but she doesn’t pry.

They have sex less than they used to, but they’re ceaselessly affectionate and tactile. Rose still wakes him up in the middle of the night with kisses and nips every so often, and he isn’t about to complain.

“I’ve built you something. A TARDIS, of sorts,” he says one night as he stands beside her in their bathroom, brushing his teeth while she wipes her makeup off. “I didn’t tell you about it, because I wasn’t sure how long it would take to finish. I thought I’d be…gone, before it was done, but as it turns out I’m more clever than even _I_ thought.” He smiles at her reflection. “It’ll take you to him.” There’s a part of him that wants to tell her that she can use it _now_ , if she wants, because he only ever wants for her to be happy. He doesn’t though, because he knows how hurt she’ll be by his suggesting that she should and _could_ leave him. He knows that she’s happy with him and it makes his heart swell with joy.

. . . .

Rose stares at the bright red London Telephone Box that’s sitting nonchalantly in the second garage. She’s never been in here before, because she knew that he was up to something and was determined to respect his privacy. Even if the kids sometimes came and went, carrying alien bits and bobs and knowing expressions on their faces.

Bethany, James and Charlie are all stood in front of it, obviously proud as punch. Rose doesn’t fail to notice the way that James traces a finger lovingly along the handle and she thinks that he really is his father’s son.

She feels fingers on her waist and turns to face her freckled love, who is positively beaming at her with excitement. He tucks the blind-fold that he’d insisted she wear into his trouser pocket and takes her hand, walking her to the phone box. Bethany reverently passes her a key, dangling from a simple, elegant chain.

. . . .

They sit on a park bench and look up at the sky, a lovely daffodil yellow with flecks of dark green. The Doctor is licking his chocolate ice-cream enthusiastically, but nine hundred plus years of memory and fifty odd years of living on top of that have still not graced him with the ability to eat it well. He’s got chocolate on the tip of his nose and at the corners of his mouth and she finds him more loveable than she ever has.

Rose stares, as politely as one can, at the locals. They’re of the seven-legged variety, and an interesting shade of puce. They’ve no hair, but their heads are encrusted with silver jewels that form intricate and beautiful patterns. They wear long, whispering dresses of varying colours, because, the Doctor informs her, _it was just too much bloody effort tucking seven legs into seven pant-legs._

She dabs at his thumb with her tissue as a trickle of chocolate starts to dribble down it. “Honestly,” she gently, laughingly chastises, “all the wonderful things you can do and yet you can’t eat an ice-cream.”

He sticks his nose up into the air indignantly. “It’s more fun if you make a mess. Some things, Rose Tyler my love, you’ve got to treat as if you’re still a child. Remember when you were wee? Getting ice-cream or going to McDonald’s was the biggest treat in the world.”

She knows that he’s bluffing, covering for the fact that he's messy, but the sentiment is one she likes so she wipes the chocolatey smudges from the sides of his mouth with the tip of her finger. Sly old thing that he is, he licks it off before she has a chance to clean it on her napkin.

“You’re incorrigible,” she says around a chuckle.

He looks impossibly proud, as if she's just paid him a compliment of the highest order. “Yup, that’s me!”

They sit side by side until he finishes his ice-cream and the wind picks up. The Doctor slips the arm closest to Rose out of his jacket, shuffles closer to her so that their sides and thighs are touching, and wraps them both up in its warmth.

Before Rose knows what she’s doing, she begins to put voice to the thoughts that have been tumbling around in her mind. “Do you think you’d like to…that is to say, when you…” the merest thought of him dying makes her throat constrict. Even though she knows that somewhere in the other universe, the other Doctor is waiting for her, this doesn’t lessen the pain. She loves them both, with all her heart, but they aren’t models that she can trade in. Each is irreplaceable.

“When I die,” the Doctor says softly, gently, tenderly into her ear, helping her along. It’s an idea that he’s grown comfortable with, even though he wishes that he could give her forever.

She nods swiftly. “Yes. Well…would you like to be on some distant, fantastic alien world? Amongst the stars and a million years into our future?”

He looks at her and it is at times like these that she remembers that even though he is still the oncoming storm, he is tempered by mortality and moulded by love. “Honestly? I’ve done all that nine times already and quite frankly it gets a little old. I can think of nothing better than to pass in my jim-jams, in _our_ bedroom, in _our_ home, in _our_ village, in _our_ country, on _our_ daft little planet called Earth. Surrounded by you.”

. . . .

This, he knows, is his last night. He’s not sure if all humans have this sense or if it’s something to do with his being half Time-Lord; no such feelings ever came forth from Gallifrey and he is once again a pioneer.

He knows that when he falls asleep tonight, he will never again wake up.

“Rose,” he whispers as he watches her move about their bedroom, carrying out her familiar nightly routine.

She pulls her pyjamas out from behind her pillow and locks her gaze with his. She strips for him, in front of him; unbuttons her blouse, unzips her jeans, unclasps her bra and shimmies out of her knickers. Fond memories float through his mind and they smile at each other like giddy fools as she puts her pyjamas on. 

Not long after, she’s snuggled against his side, all warmth and cotton and familiarity. She rests her head lightly on his shoulder.

He turns slightly, and his bones protest, but he ignores the pain and reaches for the box he’d put on his bed-side table. Carefully he opens it, revealing a modest ring exactly like the one he himself is wearing. It's a masculine variation of the one on her fourth finger. “I made this a long time ago. For him.”

She stays awake the whole night, her arms wrapped around him, her cheek resting on his shoulder. She can feel his chest rise and fall beneath her hands. She can feel the puffs of his breath against the top of her head.

His breaths peter out and his chest stills.

. . . .

. . . .

 

“He made this for you,” Rose whispers as she holds up the ring.

They’re stood somewhere in the rolling green and grey plains of the North York Moors, and Rose wouldn’t be at all surprised if Wuthering Heights appeared through the fog at any moment. The metal band clinks against her own and Rose holds her hands steady so that the Doctor can inspect them both. 

His hesitance in taking the ring from her fingers is just another reminder of how different the man standing before her is to the man she’s spent the last fifty years with. When they’d married in the gardens at her parents' house, that Doctor had bounded up to her, snogged the living daylights out of her, slid the ring on her finger in a flurry of excitement and then grinned, a touch embarrassed, when he’d remembered that he was actually supposed to wait for the ceremony.

She gives him time, merely studying a rabbit nibbling at the grass as he studies the ring in her hands. It’s been a little over two years since she’d parked the time-travelling London Telephone Box beside the Police Public Call Box, and it’s been four years since losing her human Doctor. Emotionally, she hadn’t been able to hop across universes straight away and she hadn’t been able to dive right into a relationship with the Doctor now before her. 

She’d had things to sort out with Beth and James and Charlie; she’d been reluctant to leave them, her _children_ , her flesh and blood, but with each passing year they looked even older than she did. In the end, it had been her own old argument that had convinced her that the time was right. _Everyone leaves home in the end._ Her children were all grown up, had happy and healthy lives of their own to lead. They were creatures of the earth, and their adventurous spirits made them appreciate the far reaches of Peru, the high peaks of New Zealand, not Time and Space.

She thinks about her babies, her husband and _his_ ring, forever in the other universe. Though their lives were of different lengths, she and the Doctor had carved out a new family, a new line to trickle down through the ages. He would never be forgtotten.

She whirls back to the present when she feels warm skin brush against her wrist, watches as he gently takes the ring from her.

He is radiating nervousness, but there’s no denying the small smile that plays around the sides of his mouth; he drops his gaze to his left hand and slips the ring onto his fourth finger.

. . . .

They sit on a park bench and look up at the sky, a lovely daffodil yellow with flecks of dark green. The Doctor is licking his chocolate ice-cream enthusiastically, but nine hundred plus years of living have still not graced him with the ability to eat it well.

During the first few years, whenever they’d landed anywhere that she’d travelled in a red London Phone Box to see, she’d been overcome with sadness, overcome with longing for her daft little freckled human love. 

These days though, the memories feel like warm, comfortable blankets - the similarities between them sooth her. Time and the learning that it allows have taught her to love them both, have taught her that life isn’t about replacement. Sometimes she tells him stories about Bethany and Charlie and James, and when he’d tentatively suggested that they try for their own at some point, she’d found herself oddly open to the idea.

At the moment though, he’s got chocolate on the tip of his nose and at the corners of his mouth and she finds him more loveable than she ever has.

She dabs at his thumb with her tissue as a trickle of chocolate starts to dribble down it. “Honestly,” she gently, laughingly chastises, “all the wonderful things you can do and yet you can’t eat an ice-cream.”

He sticks his nose up into the air indignantly. “It’s more fun if you make a mess. Some things, Rose Tyler my love, you’ve got to treat as if you’re still a child. Remember when you were wee? Getting ice-cream or going to McDonald’s was the biggest treat in the world.”

Her heart thumps and swells in her chest, but she can’t hold back her beaming grin. She still knows that he’s bluffing, covering for the fact that he's messy, so she wipes the chocolatey smudges from the sides of his mouth with the tip of her finger. Sly old thing that he is, he licks it off before she has a chance to clean it on her napkin.

“You’re incorrigible,” she says around a chuckle.

He looks impossibly proud, as if she's just paid him a compliment of the highest order. “Yup, that’s me!”

Eventually, when the wind picks up and the yellow fades to the darkest of greens, they snuggle up close and amble out of the park.

_“We’ll travel in this for a little while,” the Doctor said as he patted the red walls affectionately. “In honour of him. Jack said he’d watch my TARDIS for us.”_

_Rose stared at him, completely taken-aback by what he was proposing – leaving behind his treasured, beautiful blue Police Public Call Box, in an effort to commemorate all that his other self had done._

Hand in hand, they make their way home.

To a little red London Phone Box.


End file.
